Sean Bell Gunned Down on His Wedding Day –
Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Police State Repression!

50 Bullets: Racist NYPD Cop Execution, Again

In the
early morning hours of
November 25, a squad of New York City police surrounded a car of three
unarmed
black and Latinomen, and unleashed
a hail of bullets: 50 shots in total. The killer cops murdered the
driver,
23-year-old Sean Bell, on the day he was to marry his fiancée
and the mother of
the couple’s two children, Nicole Paultre. Sean’s friend Joseph Guzman,
31, was
critically wounded by eleven bullets, while another friend in the car,
Trent
Benefield, 23, was hit three times. Even though neither had done or
were
charged with anything, both were shackled to their hospital beds until
protesters forced the police to remove the handcuffs, and they are
still
hospitalized. Meanwhile, the police are on a rampage, terrorizing the
Queens
community with a racist dragnet arresting witnesses.

Family photo
of Sean Bell and his fiancée Nicole Paultre with their daughter.

While the media
babble on about
the “fog of the moment,” “contagious shooting” and other claptrap, this
was
anexecution by the cops. As the New
York Police Department desperately tries to find someone to frame for
the
bloody crime their cops perpetrated, angry demonstrators recalled the
1999 murder
of Amadou Diallo in the doorway of his home by a police death squad
that fired
off 41 shots. Where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani inflamed protesters with his
vociferous defense of the police and attempts to smear their victim,
his
successor, Michael Bloomberg, has tried to cool things out, giving
hypocritical
condolences to Sean Bell’s family and companion, describing the
fusillade of
police bullets as “excessive,” and lining up Democratic politicians,
first and
foremost Al Sharpton, to back his lying claim that a fair investigation
was
underway.

Yet the stark reality
is that
there is not going to be an investigation to find out the truth of what
happened that night but only a cover-up. As always, the bourgeois
politicos are
going to stand by their police, who are the armed fist of the bosses,
the
backbone of the capitalist state. Their task is to “serve and protect”
the
interests of the exploiters by riding roughshod over the exploited. Not
that
there is much to “investigate”: even if the cops managed to “find” a
gun after
digging up every block around the scene of their crime, it would still
be
racist police murder. What’s needed is to mobilize power – the
power of
the multiracial working class along with black, immigrant and other
oppressed
“minority” populations who together are the overwhelming majority of
New York –
to put a stop to police brutality. And that will take nothing less than
socialist
revolution.

Soon after Sean Bell and his friends left
Club Kalua
at 4 a.m. on November 25 after having a bachelor party on the eve of
his
wedding, a squad of plainclothes cops went after them. Trapping Bell’s
Altima
sedan between an unmarked van and an unmarked car, the police got out
and began
their deadly shooting spree. A white cop let loose 31 rounds, emptying
an
entire clip from his rapid-fire Glock automatic, reloading and firing
off
another. Police bullets were flying all over the place, hitting a lamp
in a
living room, breaking windows in a nearby AirTrain facility. But not a
shot was
fired in response. The cops said Bell had rammed them; the surviving
victims
say they were trying to escape what looked like a carjacking. The lead
undercover cop claims he identified himself as police; at least five
witnesses
plus the victims say the police never showed badges or identified
themselves in
any matter until after the shooting.

Amadou Diallo was
gunned down by
a squad known as the Street Crimes Unit which prowled the Bronx
supposedly
looking for guns and drugs and repeatedly arresting innocent people.
The police
“perps” in Bell’s execution were part of another elite outfit, the Club
Enforcement Unit, who were staking out 88 establishments in Queens
looking for
drugs and prostitution. The white cop who fired 31 shots has more than
600
arrests under his belt. The professional squad apparently didn’t have
time to
plant a “drop gun” on their victims, as the cops usually do. So the
police have
been desperately trying to dig up some “evidence” of a weapon or a
mythical
“fourth man” in the bullet-riddled car who somehow miraculously managed
to
escape in order to exonerate the killers. The press is claiming the
killing was
not racist because several of the cops were black and Latino. But the
fact is
that police gunmen overwhelmingly shoot minority “suspects”; the race
of the
individual cops isn’t key, it’s the system of repression that is
inherently
racist.

Going back over the years, protesters
recalled the unending
series of killings like that of Patrick Dorismond, killed in Manhattan
in 2000
by an undercover narcotics detective who said he thought the young man
was a
drug dealer; a grand jury didn’t indict the cop. Many of the victims
have been
Latino, like Anthony Baez, choked to death while playing football
outside his
Bronx home in 1995; the killer cop walked. Columnist Bob Herbert in the
New
York Times (30 November) recalled the police execution of
10-year-old
Clifford Glover, shot in the back in 1973; the 1976 killing of
15-year-old
Randolph Evans, shot in the head; and grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs,
killed by a
police shotgun blast inside her apartment in 1984 in an attempted
eviction.
More recently there was the case of Malcolm Ferguson, murdered in 2000
by
police only blocks away from where Diallo was shot to death; his
mother,
Juanita Young, who has persisted in fighting police brutality, was
arrested in
her home the day after Bell was killed by cops who kicked her in the
chest and
back. And this pattern of racist police murder isn’t limited to New
York: just
last month 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston was killed in her Atlanta home
in a
“no-knock” police drug raid.

The list is endless: hundreds of victims of
police
brutality around the country in an unbroken string of racist
repression. But
this is not just “business as usual.” The “war on terror” unleashed by
the government
of Republican George Bush with the full support of Democrats in
Congress has
led to the intensification of police terror in the U.S. The U.S.A.
Patriot Act
legalized a raft of measures for domestic spying and arbitrary
detention of
immigrants. Over 2,000 immigrants, overwhelmingly of Arab and Near
Eastern
origin, were rounded up and held incommunicado for months after the 11
September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Thousands more were
deported
without any pretense of due process. Shortly after the March 2003
invasion of
Iraq, NYPD police killed 57-year-old black grandmother Alberta Spruill
in her
apartment with a flash grenade; and in California, cops fired on an
antiwar
protest at the Oakland docks, wounding at least six longshoremen. After
the
pervasive use of torture by U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan and
at the Guantánamo prison camp was revealed, the government has
moved to
legalize these war crimes as well as warrantless wiretapping and other
police-state measures.

Right
now there is a concerted “bipartisan” effort by
the partner parties of U.S. capitalism to keep the lid on New York.
Democrat
bigwig Al Sharpton (a former FBI informer), now considered respectable
by a
bourgeois establishment that previous shunned him as a “rabble rouser,”
is
talking about some kind of mass civil action along with Jesse Jackson
where
they can chant “No justice, no peace” without disturbing anything. NYC
city
council member Charles Barron has called for the removal of NYPD chief
Ray Kelly
(whom Sharpton supports) and wants the now-Democratic Congress to
investigate.
Yet Democrats, black and white, seek to keep protests limited to
pressuring the
government and line up silently behind Republican mayor Bloomberg on TV
to show
their support. Still, when Democratic councilman Thomas White Jr. told
a crowd
of 300 outside the hospital where Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield are
convalescing, “We are not going to be angry,” the crowd responded, “Oh
yes we
are.”

The latest police execution brought together
once more
the families of the victims. Amadou’s mother, Kadiatou Diallo, a
Guinean
immigrant, traveled from Baltimore for Sean Bell’s funeral. Patrick’s
mother,
Marie Rose Dorismond, a Haitian immigrant, rode the bus from Miami to
be there.
A few feet from the coffin, she cried out: “Again? Again? Again?” The
mother of
Gidone Busch, a Hasidic Jewish man executed by the police in Borough
Park in
1999, who maintains close contact with Amadou’s mother, unfortunately
could not
attend Juanita Young had just gotten out of the hospital after her
latest abuse
at the hands of the cops. While liberals put the blame for these
tragedies
solely on rabid reactionaries like Republican Giuliani (or Democrat Ed
Koch),
just as they call the occupation of Iraq “Bush’s war,” the 50 shots
that rang
out in Jamaica, Queens taking the young life of Sean Bell, like the 41
shots
that cut down Amadou Diallo, are proof that racist police brutality is
produced
by a system.

That system is
capitalism, and
from the days of the slave-catchers – who terrorized blacks north and
south of
the Mason-Dixon Line – to today, when killer cops target blacks,
Latinos,
immigrants and anyone else who gets in their way, the system rests on
brutal
repression. In demonstrations against police brutality, the Iraq war
and for
immigrant rights, the Internationalist Group has emphasized that
“Imperialist
War Abroad Means Police-State Repression ‘At Home’.” The fight against
racist
cop terror cannot be limited to calls for investigations or the removal
of
particular police officials. The killers are not just “bad apples” or
“rogue
cops,” they are enforcers of racist, capitalist “law and order” which
treats
ethnic minority communities like occupied territories. The police think
they
can “get away with murder” against young black men in Queens because
they have
done so for years. “Racial profiling” is nothing new, it has just
become more
blatant since 9-11.

Today, the Democratic Party has become the
main war
party responsible for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In
New York,
the Democrats have been key in preventing mobilizations
against cop
terror that should have taken place in recent days. Many of those who
came to
pay their respects at the funeral and who have participated in various
protests
have carried signs saying “Justice for Sean Bell.” To achieve justice
for the
oppressed, to defeat imperialist war and the police-state repression it
breeds,
it is necessary to break with the parties of the oppressors and build a
workers
party that fights for the socialist revolution that will put
billionaire
Bloomberg and his capitalist cronies out of business. To put an end to
the
system of police brutality you have to sweep away the capitalist
masters who
give the orders and the guns to the killer cops. n